The International Institute for Socio-Informatics coordinates the conference series "International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T)". The C&T conferences are an international forum to discuss the relationship between communities and technology.
Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. For a number of reasons, researchers are interested in communities. First, within a global knowledge-based society, communities play a pivotal role. Problems such as new forms of political participation and civic engagement, the maintenance of cultural identities, or the integration of minorities need to be tackled on the community level. Second, communities also re-shape the processes of learning and sharing knowledge in and among organizations. While earlier approaches focused on storing and retrieving explicit knowledge represented in documents, communities are believed to be important structures to share implicit situated knowledge, as well.
Given a new dimension by the use of electronic networks, inter-organizational cooperation is nowadays often discussed in terms of B2B-Marketplaces, Supply Chain Management, Virtual Organizations, or Strategic Alliances. Many failed attempts to implement these approaches can be attributed to inadequate attention to the issues of communities. Finally new types of communities, e.g. on-line communities, might change the relationship between producer and consumer.
Information technologies may support or hinder these and other types of communities. So there are considerable research challenges to be discussed.
